This unidentified quartet used the piano during a performance in the 1940s in the St. Anthony Hotel’s Peacock Alley.

This unidentified quartet used the piano during a performance in the 1940s in the St. Anthony Hotel’s Peacock Alley.

Photo: Courtesy St. Anthony Hotel

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This piano once was the centerpiece of the St. Anthony Hotel's Peacock Alley.

This piano once was the centerpiece of the St. Anthony Hotel's Peacock Alley.

Photo: Courtesy Of Bonhams

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This piano once was the centerpiece of the St. Anthony Hotel's Peacock Alley.

This piano once was the centerpiece of the St. Anthony Hotel's Peacock Alley.

Photo: Courtesy Of Bonhams

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Fernando Herrera and nephew(standing), Mike Lerma pose for a publicty at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio in early 1980's. Herrera is playing a piano worth $150,000. Courtesy photo of the Herrera family.

Fernando Herrera and nephew(standing), Mike Lerma pose for a publicty at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio in early 1980's. Herrera is playing a piano worth $150,000. Courtesy photo of the Herrera family.

Photo: Courtesy The Herrera Family

Noted S.A. piano on the auction block

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The wildly ornate piano that for decades was the centerpiece of the St. Anthony Hotel's famed Peacock Alley will be seen in public Monday for the first time in the 20 years since it was spirited away in the dead of night.

Unfortunately, the instrument will make its reappearance in a San Francisco auction house, not the St. Anthony's sun-lit loggia.

The Steinway art case piano is the highlight of an auction of fine European furniture, decorative arts and garden ornaments scheduled for noon Monday at the San Francisco auction house Bonhams.

Indeed, the rococo piano, looking like something out of a Liberace fever dream, is pictured on the cover of the glossy 168-page auction catalog.

It isn't likely the St. Anthony's new owners may be among the bidders.

The catalog describes the piano as a “notable example of exquisite partnering of the finest marquetry inlay and boldly conceived gilt-bronze mounts.”

It pegs its value at $60,000 to $80,000.

First brought to San Antonio by railroad tycoon and St. Anthony owner Ralph W. Morrison in 1938, the piano is in excellent shape, according to Jeffrey Smith, vice president and director of Bonhams' Furniture and Decorative Arts Department in the United States. He said there should be plenty of interest in it.

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“A piano of this quality comes on the world market only once every few years,” he said.

For decades, the piano held a special place in San Antonio's collective heart. And then that heart was broken when, in 1993, the instrument was unceremoniously packed up and shipped out of town.

“One day it was there and the next, it was gone,” recalled Debbie Gonzalez, who worked in the St. Anthony's hotel sales department at the time and is, today, director of sales. “It was horrible. There was such an uproar.”

“One of this city's most-treasured and legendary keepsakes no longer is San Antonio's,” the late San Antonio Express-News columnist David Anthony Richelieu mourned at the time.

For all the fond memories surrounding the piano, a good portion of the instrument's history is shrouded in mystery. Steinway & Co. records say construction of the Model L Player Piano was completed Aug. 19, 1924, after which it was shipped to Paris where the firm of L. Alavoine et Compagnie decorated the plain mahogany case with mounts of exotic woods and bronze gilded with gold in the shape of vines, flowers and other flourishes.

“It took a year to complete, but when it was done, the piano was truly one of a kind,” Smith said.

From Paris, the piano was shipped to the Aeolian Co. in New York for one of its clients.

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How to buy: Bids will be accepted online. For information and to register, visit bonhams.com and click on the "how to" tab. Then click on "buy."

The auction catalog notes that a newsletter published for the 1983 National Preservation Conference held at the St. Anthony claimed Morrison purchased the piano that had once belonged to “a czar.”

However, the catalog also states categorically that “there is no known documentation to substantiate the piano being made for or placed in the Russian Embassy either in Paris or Washington.” Smith said he didn't attempt to contact the embassy directly and a recent phone call and email to the embassy seeking information about the piano both went unanswered.

For die-hard believers, Smith offers this tantalizing tidbit: Morrison purchased the piano shortly after the Soviet Embassy in Washington was renovated and expanded. Surely an ornate, Louis XV-style piano would have clashed with the Stalinist architecture the Soviets favored at the time.

As for it once belonging to Russian Czar Nicolas II? “It didn't,” Richelieu snipped.

What is known is that Morrison purchased the piano in 1938 for $27,000 (about $441,000 in today's money). He's also believed to have had the player piano mechanism removed and had the piano restrung as a manual instrument.

During the next five-and-a-half decades, the piano became a permanent fixture in the hotel.

“Every bride who ever got married here had her photo taken in front of that piano,” Gonzalez recalled.

It was also the centerpiece of elegant weekday afternoon quartet recitals.

“People who lived in the apartments upstairs would come down and have tea,” said Clyde J.B. Johnson IV, chief investment officer of San Antonio-based BC Lynd Hospitality, which purchased the hotel out of receivership last spring. “And the old ladies there had their specific spot that they always sat at.”

Then in 1993, wrote Richelieu, without notice, the piano disappeared, “rolled out, packed up and shipped off to San Francisco” by Larry Chan, owner and chairman of Park Lane Hotels, the St. Anthony's parent company at the time.

The piano isn't the only object of value that has gone missing from the hotel.

“When we acquired the hotel, there were a lot of artifacts that we have historical write-ups on or appraisals for,” according to Lynd CEO Brandon S. Raney. “But when we started doing an accounting, it's like, 'Where are these things?'”

The hotel recently launched a website — stanthonyhistory.com — through which guests and visitors can share their stories and photos of the hotel.

“We're interested in rebuilding a history of the hotel,” Raney said. “Rarely do we run into someone who doesn't have some kind of memory or experience at this hotel.”

And one part of that history is the missing piano.

Raney and Johnson said they just recently became aware that the piano was to be offered at auction and, while they would love to have it, “We've got lots and lots of things pulling on our budget,” Raney said.

Still, he continues, “This is an important artifact that had significant meaning to people who worked in and visited the hotel. It's a piece of artwork.”